Friday, October 31, 2014

Edited by Dennis Cooper, Grab Bag is comprised of two interrelated novels, Dark Rides and Wish Book, both are set in the same small rural city, in different eras. The cover features an illustration by Ian Phillips (Pas de Chance), which recognizes McCormack's ongoing obsession with Halloween.

The title was chosen as one of the Village Voice's Best Books of the Year in 2004, and has received considerable praise elsewhere:

"Anyone interested in the more wicked, crafty forms of Canadian writing would be well advised to spend time with McCormack."

"Grab Bag culls the best of the perverse and innocent world of Derek McCormack. The mystery of objects, the lyricism of neglected lives, the menace and nostalgia of the past – these are all ingredients in this weird and beautiful parallel universe."

– Edmund White

"[A] kaleidoscopic look at a world of cheap furbelows and carnival flash, a place where childlike wonder goes hand in hand with cruel cynicism, and where even the promise of heaven appears as tawdry as an eyeshadow case."

– Ryan Brooks, Chicago Reader

"[A] rare treat ... Weird, inventive, wonderful."

– Jorge Morales, Village Voice

"The first U.S. outing for the sexy, edgy Canadian novelist, steered your way by the gratifyingly dark-souled Dennis Cooper."

Like many early Fluxus editions, George Maciunas had conceived this as a "complete works by" project. Edited by Shigeko Kubota and designed by Maciunas, the double-side poster features documentation of the Japanese group's various "events and exhibits". These include performances such as Cleaning Event, where the trio washed city streets by hand.

Continuing Genpei Akasegawa’s series of bundled objects wrapped in rope or fabricated 1,000-Yen-Notes (and possibly referencing Marcel Duchamp's poster design for the DADA 1916 - 1923 exhibition, below), the poster was also sold crumpled and rolled, tied together with rope.

The poster version seems to have sold for fifty cents, and the crumpled version for $5.00. It was also included in various Fluxus anthologies and kits. The above examples are in the collection of the MOMA and Harvard, including the third image, which is Genpei Akasegawa’s prototype.

Hi Red Center consisted of Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Jiro Takamatsu. The name was based on the meanings of the first kanji of each of their surnames — “taka” (high), “aka” (red) and “naka” (center).

Genpei Akasegawa died last week. Brief obituaries can be read in ArtNet, here, and The Japan Times, here. Details of a retrospective of Hi Red Centre activities at the MOMA last year can be found here. Their Mystery Can multiple can be seen here.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Genpei Akasegawa, perhaps the only artist to be best-known for an exhibition invitation, has died at the age of 77.

Genpei Akasegawa, with the Hi Red Centre group he founded, mailed a reproduced 1,000 yen note as an invitation to their 1963 exhibition. The card contained a monochromatic reproduction of the bill on the front and the verso had information regarding the exhibit. A year later they were noticed by the police and he was indicted on charges of counterfeit forgery. In August of 1966, the case went to trial and was dubbed the "Thousand-Yen Bill Incident." Part of the artist's defense was to wrap the jury in string. He was found guilty in 1967, appealed twice and twice lost.

Two of my favourite works from the Montreal Biennale are The Prophets (at the MAC) and The Golden USB (at VOX), both by the collaborative team of Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens. The former is a thirteen-metre-long table displaying graphs, diagrams and models crafted from various everyday materials such as wire, string, paper, coloured acetate, netting, etc. The latter updates the Carl Sagan Voyager Golden Record as a trade catalogue of earthly goods, which becomes a framework for an exhibition consisting of multiple videos and objects.

The above book, published by their own imprint in 2012, is available for $10 CDN from Art Metropole, here, and Librairie Formats, here.

For more information, see the AGYU Artist Book of the Moment shortlist, here, or the artists' website, here.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

"From August 2005 to June 2006 I bought 32 new outfits for myself, initially once a week, later once a fortnight. The only criterion for my choice was the price: it couldn’t be higher than ± 10 euros.”

Friday, October 24, 2014

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Art Toronto (previously the Toronto International Art Fair, or TIAF) launches tonight with a Collector's and Opening Night Preview from 4:30 - 10pm. The fair runs from Friday October 24 until Monday October 27 and is held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre at 255 Front St. West.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Sculptor, writer and co-publisher of 0 to 9 magazine, Rosemary Mayer has passed away. The periodical was made in collaboration with her sister Bernadette Mayer, and her then-husband Vito Acconci. From 1967 to 1969, the three produced the mimeographed publication that featured contributions from Robert Barry, Clark Coolidge, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Jackson Mac Low, Harry Mathews, Adrian Piper, Bern Porter, Yvonne Rainer, Jerome Rothenberg, Aram Saroyan, Robert Smithson, Alan Sondheim, Hannah Weiner, Emmett Williams, and many others.

"Vito and I created 0 To 9 as an environment for our own work, which did not seem to exist anywhere else.

We based the name of the magazine after Jasper Johns’ work 0 Through 9. The publishing of 0 To 9 also bypassed the sagas of trying to get work, including one’s first book, published by an established press. We found a mimeograph machine in my boyfriend Ed Bowes’ father’s office in New Jersey. We had to buy paper, stencils and ink from the A.B. Dick company. For each issue we drove there with the typed stencils when the office closed at 5pm, and by the time they reopened at 8 am, we would have an issue of 0 To 9 run off and collated. Friends would help us, including my sister Rosemary Mayer. It was an accidentally ecologically sound thing to do.

The pages of 0 To 9 looked more like maps than literature and sometimes were maps or directions; for example, the Seneca song from Number 5 by Richard Johnny John and Jerome Rothenberg. Typing the stencils for the magazine was no mean task. The correction fluid for them made you high in an unpleasant way and the liquid had to dry on the stencil film while it was separated from the padding and backing sheets. You blew on it, having put a pencil between the sheets. Actually, the point was never to make mistakes because it was impossible to get the corrections in the same place as the original.

We’d print between 100 and 350 copies for each issue, taking them around to bookstores in New York City, sending them elsewhere and to our subscribers. Needless to say we didn’t make hordes of money. Nothing was perfect about 0 To 9 in its mimeograph form. We were trying to get far away from the idea, so promulgated, of the perfection of the poem with white space around it, set off from other things. The first cover was a mimeograph stencil — it was dark blue. Next was a rainfall map of the US. The third cover was all the first lines of work in the magazine. For the fourth issue, we wrapped all the book jackets Vito and I had in our possession around the cover. The fifth cover was a crumpled sheet of paper and the sixth was six blank sheets of paper.

Vito and I both had gone to Catholic schools, thus our earnestness and sadomasochism. I don’t think either of us had any less ambition than to change the world. My sister met some of the boys from Regis, where Vito went to high school, and Vito began courting her. He would take here to dinner at the Chateau Henri IV. When they got married, I was the maid of honor. For a time I went out with Vito’s friend Bob Viscusi, now a poet and professor at Brooklyn College. I had grown up in Brooklyn, Ridgewood to be exact, very close to the next trendy section of Brooklyn—Bushwick.

Vito had gone to Holy Cross and then joined the Marines. After that he went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop with my sister, where they lived in a Quonset hut. My parents had died in their forties, so I moved in with my uncle and grandfather, probably propelled to write poetry by “the people downstairs,” who were my godmother’s son, Richard Nirengarten, his wife and their baby. They had plastic on the furniture and would fight a lot. My uncle, a devout Catholic living in the single state of blessedness, would create a pile of Ave Maria’s (a magazine unlike 0 To 9) so the unread copies were on top. My grandfather was world-weary, stingy and liked yellow pants. He would lock me out of the house at night because “I should’ve done my reading in the daylight.” In high school my sister joined the Ridgewood Saints, a gang that had garrison belts. This was the time of the ’50s and ’60s, so we learned a lot — like how to make art that had no boundaries and to expect that change was possible. After all, Robert Smithson made an upside-down tree."

Monday, October 20, 2014

I'm en route to Montreal now, via a wifi-outfitted train, which is considerably more civilized than driving. Unlike every drive or plane ride I've ever taken, I almost wish it were longer.

A panel discussion in advance of the Montreal Biennale opening happens tonight at 8pm, at the McCord Museum. Curators Gregory Burke, Peggy Gale, Lesley Johnstone and Mark Lanctôt, will be moderated by Executive and Artistic Director Sylvie Fortin. The Benefit Preview is tomorrow night at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, from 7pm. A few tickets remain to the Cocktail reception, which features a 'soundscape' by DJ Xarah Dion. They can be purchased for $150, here.

In addition to A Drink To Us [When We're Both Dead], below, I am showing a video work called Timeline at the Arsenal. A 45 minute version was shown in 2011 as part of Earl Miller's Queen West section of Nuit Blanche, and last November Eleanor King showed a 60 minute version in Halifax as a part of Nocturne. The current, and presumably final version, is 76 minutes long and is now packaged in an edition of 5, available at MKG127.

A foil-stamped linen box houses the film on DVD, on a portable hard drive and also includes a print and the bookwork Alternate 20th Century. An additional bookwork, Alternate Timeline, is included on the drive as an epub.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Yoko Ono's Infinite Universe At Dawn is currently being bound in Italy, and will begin shipping next month. The book is billed as "her first curated selection of her seminal art and activism across eight decades", which both ignores previous monographs such as Yes Yoko Ono and suggests the book will include activism works from Ono's childhood, but the 340 page leather-bound book certainly seems extravagant. Housed in a leather and buckram slipcase, the title features tipped in postcards, trace pages, a piece of the sky puzzle piece and a mirrored 'Smile' card. The cover features a die-cut 'Hole To See The Sky'.

I'm also unclear how many different editions exist, as the site refers to a limited edition (they're all limited, to 1500 copies), an 'intricate edition' and a 'collector edition' (only 1,150 books numbered 351 to 1,500). I'm not sure if these are all different, as the ordering page doesn't specify, and the only price listed is £325.00 ($524 US, $591 CDN).

Saturday, October 18, 2014

The Montreal Biennale opens next week, at various locations throughout the city. Titled Looking Forward, it is curated by Gregory Burke and Peggy Gale and "examines the relationship of contemporary art practices to speculation, futurity and its history, as well as the currency of projecting into the future."

I have two works in the show, one at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the other at Arsenal. One is an edition and the other is a video about to be editioned (I'm putting the final touches on the packaging this week).

A Drink To Us [When We're Both Dead] is a barrel of scotch whiskey buried six years ago, which will remain underground for another ninety-four. The spirit is available for sale now. Buyers receive a foil-stamped linen box which contains an empty wooden box, with the whiskey unavailable until 2108. The box includes a map to the unmarked site in the Glenfiddich warehouse in Dufftown, Scotland, a contract outlining the terms and conditions and a "100 Year Diary", featuring relevant excerpts from the blog I kept for the three months I was there (here).

Any buyer old enough to purchase it now will be long dead when the scotch is available, so the work must be passed on to a descendent.

Thursday, October 16, 2014

The Criterion Collection has just announced its January releases, which includes Guy Maddin's 2007 "love letter to his home town", My Winnipeg. Previously, Maddin was represented in the collection by Brand Upon the Brain, from 2006.

The "Director Approved Special Edition" will feature a new high-definition digital restoration, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray. The extras include a conversation between Maddin and art critic Robert Enright, a 2008 featurette called “My Winnipeg” Live in Toronto, three short films by Maddin (Spanky: To the Pier and Back, Sinclair, and Only Dream Things), deleted scenes and the original trailer.

Yesterday Printed Matter opened the exhibition Ray Johnson and Friends: Exhibition Posters and Ephemera from the Collections of William Wilson and the Estate of Ray Johnson, a selection of rare posters and ephemera from the late 1950’s to the early 1980’s. Alongside these invitations and posters, are selections from Johnson’s contemporaries, many of them close friends and collaborators, including Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Bridget Riley, Robert Smithson, and Ben Vautier will be on view.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Below is a recount of early sounds that influenced his body of work. It is the answer to a single question ("Let's talk about the first sounds that you were aware of as a child") in an interview with Gabrielle Zuckerman for American Public Media, July 2002.

"As some people know, I have written extensively about my childhood experiences with sound. There were certain sounds that were especially influential to me, such as the sound of the wind blowing around the corners and through the attic of the log cabin that I was born in, in Bern, Idaho in 1935. Bern was a little Swiss dairy community that had 149 residents at that time, and it was in Bear Lake Valley. In the winter, the wind would come up at forty miles an hour over the lake, and in a blizzard you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. This wind going through the log cabin was really something.

The other sound that really had a big influence on me was the sound of step-down transformers on telephone poles in an electrical yard. I would ask my mother, "What is the wind?" I was very curious, and I would talk about the wind at ages as early as 2 or 3 years old. Looking out the window and seeing it move the alfalfa that was growing outside the cabin, my mother would try to explain to me what the wind was. But while she was talking, I was also listening to the sound of these telephone poles, and it was just a continuous steady hum. This continuous steady hum is the ancestral origin of my work with sixty-cycles, which is the frequency that the electrical companies provide the power to us in the United States: 60 cycles per second. Everywhere we go, we hear this 60 cycle drone and, or, other frequency components that are related to this drone. Eventually I began to tune all of my music that I do in the U.S. with electronics to this 60 cycle per second drone, because even in today's year, 2001-2002, and even with the best equipment, there is still some residual hum. (60 cycles per second.) If you create music that is in tune with this hum, then there can never be an interference with the music that you are creating. It's the idea that it is the strongest drone in our vicinity.

For example, when I sing outdoors, I listen to the resonance of the canyon or the ocean, or whatever is the natural resonance of the woods... Let's say I'm walking through the woods. I sit and listen to the resonant frequency. It's easy to hear it because the birds sing at this frequency. They tune in to the resonance of the woods. You hear different birdcalls reflecting this resonance, although the calls are different. What is a resonance? A resonance is that frequency which, if you assume that you have two parallel walls, a resonant frequency is that frequency which starts on one wall, hits the other wall, and gets back to wall number 1 just in time to reinforce the very next positive pulse of the frequency. This is resonance of the simplest type. These occur in many different kinds of situations including outdoors, in canyons and in caves, tunnels, and in the woods. So, in that kind of situation, one might choose this natural resonance that is taking place, and perform with that. In the case of electronics, the 60 cycles is really the strongest frequency that we have to deal with.

It's like looking for universal constants. Eventually we're all looking for these special frequencies to which everything else is related, frequencies that have then a harmonic structure, which in turn is related to the structure of the universe. In Indian classical thought there is the idea that the universe was created with sound. In fact, it is said that when Vishnu decided to create the cosmos, he first cut himself in half and made out of one half of himself Brahma. Brahma created the world as we know it through sound. There is a famous Sanskrit line "Nada Brahma"- "Sound is God". Out of the center of himself, Vishnu created Shiva. Brahma had the soul function of creating the cosmos. Shiva destroys the cosmos and recreates it again, and again on through time. When we speak of Nada-Sound, there are two types of sound: Anahata Nada and Ahata Nada. Ahata Nada is sound as we know it in a medium: a "struck sound". They call it a struck sound, but it really means more like a bowed sound; it means the sound of my voice talking, it means the sound of my voice singing. Anahata Nada is theoretically the sound of the ethers vibrating. It is this vibration that can be a model for the sound that we actually hear and experience. Anahata Nada is the sound of universal structure. Why was it interesting for me to listen to these long sustained sounds of telephone poles, and why did I eventually introduce long sustained sounds into music?

Over the years, I've talked about various reasons why I did this. I began to discover that while I had the sustained sound, I could listen to the harmonic relationships better. This led me into my work with just intonation, or harmonic relationships. I also began to realize that when we think of the concept of the universal structure of sound, intuitively we think of something that is continuous. It is for this reason that I was called upon to introduce sustained sound into the world. Before that, there were hints, indications that there could be a sustained sound, such as the tanpura, which is used as a drone in the background in Indian Classical music. One of the new recordings that we put out on our new label is the tanpuras of Pandit Pran Nath. This is an example of Marian and I playing tanpuras, and it is the best tuning that I was ever able to record. We have made this available because so many of our students have requested it. Our teacher, Pandit Pran Nath, liked this recording so much that after we created it, he practiced with it every day for the rest of his life.

It's interesting that even at the age of 2 or 3, I began to get an intuition about the way to create music. I didn't really start to do it until 1958, when I wrote the Trio for Strings, which is the first work in the history of music that is completely composed of long sustained tones and silences. I had actually begun to write using sustained tones a year before in Four Brass in 1957, but the entire work was not composed of them."

Carefully researched and profusely illustrated with a hundred black and white photographs, this portrait of Moorman

chronicles her life from her youth in Little Rock, Arkansas (where she won “Miss City Beautiful” in 1952) through her notorious career as an artist and musician to her death from cancer in 1991.

The book documents her performances, many of which saw her playing the cello in various states of undress. She also performed nude for Nam June Paik's Sonata for Adults Only and for Cut Piece, by Yoko Ono (who contributes the Introduction to the book). She also collaborated with John Cage, Joseph Beuys and several Fluxus artists, though none rival her life-long artistic partnership with Paik.

Topless Cellist takes its name from a 1995 video Paik made in tribute to Moorman. Its title comes from a 1967 performance for which the pair achieved widespread notoriety. Paik had long felt that music was behind literature and painting in part because of the "purge" of sexuality. For his Opera Sextronique at the Film-Makers Cinematheque in New York, Moorman was to perform movements on the cello in various states of undress.

During the first movement of four movements, Moorman played Elegy by Jules Massenet wearing a bikini outfitted with blinking lights. For the second movement, she played International Lullaby by Max Matthews, topless. She was arrested mid-performance by three plainclothes police officers in the audience and charged with indecent exposure. The charges were dropped but she was fired from the American Symphony Orchestra. Moorman and Paik restaged the event for filmmaker Jud Yalkut's camera, though the film was not permitted to be shown in court.

Even without the scandalous performances, Moorman's place in New York's Avant Garde history was secured when she founded the Annual Avant Garde Festival in 1963. "No official could refuse her dream of an Avant Garde festival our city precincts", said friend and collaborator Carolee Schneemann, who also called her "bold, irrepressible and courageous". The Festival continued (though not exactly annually) until 1980.

Mooreman was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1970s. She underwent a mastectomy and continued performing through the 1980s, her health deteriorating. She died in New York City on November 8, 1991, at the age of 57.

The just-released title is available from the publisher, here. For more information on Moorman, see previous post, here.

Dedicated to Artists’ books, multiples, recordings, postcards, magazines and ephemera, this site will feature reviews of recent titles, features on artists and publishers, random listings of older works, the occasional longer essay or interview, straight-forward pictorials,links to recent news, etc. etc., in an attempt to create an aggregate of information on editioned artworks.

About Me

Dave Dyment is an artist, writer and curator based in Toronto, Canada. He is the co-editor of "One for Me and One to Share: Artists Multiples and Editions" (YYZ Books, 2012). His own work can be viewed at www.dave-dyment.com. He is represented by MKG127.